His reasoning goes something like this: because a progressive tax system is one in which the rich pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than do the poor, and because a subsidy is essentially a negative tax, then a progressive subsidy system is one in which subsidies would flow more to farms where the subsidy is a higher proportion of their sales or assets. And, according to Mr. Kirwan, that’s what we see: subsidies make up 10 percent of sales for small farms and only 4 percent of sales for large farms. So far, so progressive.

But here’s the problem as I see it. Mr Kirwan takes a pretty narrow view of what progressive means (when I hear that term, by the way, I reach for my revolver, but we’ll let it slide for now). The question isn’t whether the subsidies are being distributed “progressively” among farmers – although the fact they are not is, I think, one of the valid critiques of U.S. farm policy. The real question we should be asking ourselves is how subsidies are distributed among society, a society that Mr Kirwan claims to speak for when he says that the current income tax structure is “how we as a society have decided to measure the “fairness” of the tax system.”

And all of this ignores the main critique of farm subsidies: that they are an example of special interest politics at its worst. I’ve yet to hear of a convincing argument as to why farmers deserve taxpayer- and consumer-funded special treatment compared with other small (or large, for that matter) businesses.